Rules. Whose? Why not mine? The rules I can’t follow are rules I have to change, fit to me. It won’t work the other way round. Confidence makes the rules mine to make, mine to play. Fun. Whatever I get having fun is worth having. Only my rules know me. Why inexpertly interpret someone else’s handbook? For how much longer do I misapply someone else’s tricks? Haven’t I always eschewed tricks? Don’t fake it to make it; just make it! Tricks are fake, failed adaptations. As a diet is to eating. Know yourself and your needs, and you can trust your imagination to get them: Strategy for the honest.

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The subtlety of need is such that I can hardly be bothered to discern it. I despise compromise. Integrity is all there is. It’s a treasure buried under a mountain of conformity, an accretion of a lifetime of compromise. Being who I’m not has not gotten me any closer to what I need. I don’t care what the world wants of me. It doesn’t know me or care about me. That is true, and that’s all. Only the individual can care, and it can only care about itself and other individuals. It’s the only way for the world to be understood, the only way to unearth the treasure, expose the light of our selves. To find it is to share it; to share it is to satisfy our need. To understand, to love.

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What I want and what I can give don’t balance out. That’s what stops me making any moves toward trying to date. I want so much that I would begrudge the giving-back. It’s always been, “Where’s mine? What’s in it for me?” So desperate to find what’s mine that I couldn’t be bothered with anyone else’s. How I can know what I need and not care if anyone else gets it, I don’t understand. I do care. But how can I give what I feel I don’t have? I wanted a lot from Herself, and I offered her nothing. Do I have any more for anyone else? Do I have it for myself? It’s the asking for it I shouldn’t bother about, isn’t it? Except, how do I both give it to and take it from myself? Where is it to start with?

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After Herself filed out of his office with our supervisor, I was left to take a bit more thrashing from the big boss. He said to me after the door closed again, “You are too old for this.” I pitied him at that moment: Had he ever felt for someone the way I felt for her? Had he forgotten or long since chalked up love to an immature impetuousity? a phase to go through between this age and that age? Then you get married, make a go of “reality”–grow up. I’m not too old for anything, including making a fool of myself. Did his wife tell him he was too old for that affair? I’m not a child–the birth of my children saw to that–and my needs are not childish. Neither is there a statute of limitations on acquiring them. Am I too old to make a mistake? to be frustrated and to express it? to apologize? Too old for any of that is old enough to be dead. I have burdens enough. Why carry a headstone around?

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There is a lot to life. I still have dreams, but they aren’t those of my youth, when I wanted to be a cowboy and a fireman and a baseball player. Reality, responsibility, practicality, low self-esteem turned those dreams to smoke. I even thought I would be a writer. But everything’s so hard. My needs seem simpler, but I can’t imagine attaining them. A lifetime of everyday responsibility has not prepared me for attending to my needs, which are not a bill to pay or a job to get to on time. The life prescribed by society is not mine at all. How do I get from it what it seems to have made no provision for? Playing by the sanctioned rules wins only trifles of that game and only amounts to a tease to keep playing. I’ve always hated playing, always knew there was nothing in it for me, no reward worth having, much less keeping; but tired of fighting or trying to play by my own rules, I would fall miserably back in line to give the pretense another go. That’s life–mine anyway: A run at freedom on a tether too short, a glimpse of my true self from too far away, then a return to the herd and my tattered blinders. Who do I think I am?